On December 15, 2025, I became eligible for Canadian citizenship. I have never lived in Canada, nor have my parents or grandparents. And I did nothing to pursue this status. But my biological grandmother, the woman who gave up my mother and her siblings for adoption, was born to parents who lived for generations in Ontario before emigrating to Detroit. With the passage of Bill C-3: An Act to Amend the Citizenship Act, the Canadian government removed its one-generation limit to citizenship by descent, paving the way for millions of people like me—known as Lost Canadians—to claim our citizenship.
Intellectually, I know that each nation-state can devise its own rules governing the legal right to citizenship. My Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem are permanent residents of Israel who are denied passports and are subject to discriminatory laws. Sierra Leone is one of several African nations to grant citizenship to Africans in the diaspora based on DNA testing. Myanmar’s decision to restrict citizenship based on ethnicity has left 600,000 Rohingya Muslims stateless, making education, travel, and property ownership nearly impossible.
Yet I was surprisingly unnerved when confronted with the reality that the government can truly create citizens with the stroke of a pen, that it can birth political identities by fiat. My sense of the fragility of my own civic identity returned a few months later when the US Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order seeking to end automatic citizenship for anyone born on US soil. Once a fringe theory, the testing of birthright citizenship in the highest court was a reminder of the tenuousness of the legal status many Americans take for granted.
